I Know It's Real Because I Experienced It

On the Power and the Limits of Direct Experience as a Source of Knowledge

I've said this: "I know it's real because I experienced it." You've probably said it, too. It's the ultimate conversational winning card, the appeal to direct experience as the foundation of knowledge.

And it's both more and less powerful than we think.

As someone who regularly experiences things that don't fit conventional frameworks, such as non-local knowing, spirit encounters, precognitive information, altered states where the normal rules of reality seem suspended, I rely heavily on direct experience as a source of knowledge. But as someone trained in rigorous thinking, I also know that "I experienced it" is not a get out of epistemology free card. Direct experience can be misleading, misinterpreted, or simply wrong.

So where does that leave us? How do we evaluate knowledge claims based on experience? When is "I experienced it" sufficient justification for belief, and when isn't it? This isn't abstract philosophy to me. It's the central question I live with every day: how do I trust my experiences while also questioning them?

Illusion or real?

The Case for Direct Experience

Let me start by acknowledging what's right about "I know because I experienced it."

Experience is Our Only Direct Contact with Reality

Everything we know ultimately traces back to experience. You know you're conscious right now because you're experiencing consciousness. You know the colour red exists because you've experienced it. You know pain is real because you've felt it. Even scientific knowledge rests on experience, since empirical observation is just systematised, controlled experience. When a physicist reads a measurement, that's an experience. When you verify a mathematical proof, following the logic is an experience. Without direct experience, we have nothing. It's the bedrock.

Some Knowledge Can't Be Acquired Any Other Way

Try explaining the colour red to someone who's never seen it. You can describe wavelengths, neural activation, cultural associations, and still not have conveyed what red is in the experiential sense. Only direct experience can do that. This is philosopher Frank Jackson's famous 'Mary's Room' thought experiment. Mary knows all the physical facts about colour but has never experienced colour herself, and when she finally sees red, does she learn something new? Most of us intuitively say yes, which means experiential knowledge is a distinct category that can't be reduced to propositional or theoretical knowledge.

First Person Authority

There's something special about your access to your own experiences. If I say, "I'm in pain right now", you can't reasonably reply, "No, you're not; you just think you are." I have privileged, authoritative access to my own subjective states. You don't. This is first person authority, the idea that we're the ultimate authority on our own experiences. Not on the interpretation of those experiences, not on their causes, but on what we're experiencing. That part, I know directly.

The Vividness and Immediacy of Experience

When you experience something directly, it has a quality of certainty that secondhand knowledge lacks. Seeing a mountain is different from reading about one. Being in love feels different than just hearing about it. This vividness is epistemologically significant, and not just psychological, because the immediacy of experience provides a kind of grounding that inference or testimony can't match.

Why Direct Experience Isn't Enough

But, and this is crucial, none of this means direct experience is infallible, or that "I experienced it" is sufficient justification for belief on its own.

Experiences Can Be Misinterpreted

You experience something. That part is certain. But what you experienced, the interpretation, is much less certain. I experience what feels like communication with a spirit in shamanic journey. But is it an actual autonomous entity, an aspect of my own psyche, an archetype in the collective unconscious, a useful fiction my brain creates, or some mixture of all of these? The experience is real. The interpretation is uncertain. Most of our experiential knowledge claims actually involve interpretation. "I experienced God" really means "I had an experience I interpret as an encounter with God." The experience happened. The interpretation is a theory.

Experiences Can Be Caused By Unusual Brain States

Someone has a mystical experience of unity with the universe during meditation. Real experience, no doubt. But does it reveal something true about reality or is it just what happens when default mode network activity decreases? Someone sees a ghost. Real experience too, because they genuinely saw something. But was it a deceased person's spirit, an hallucination, a misperception, an unusual electromagnetic field affecting their temporal lobe? The experience is genuine. The cause is debatable, and the cause matters for whether the experience gives us knowledge about external reality or just about our own minds.

Memory is Reconstructive, Not Reproductive

When you remember an experience, you're not playing back a recording. You're reconstructing it based on schemas, expectations, and subsequent information. This means your memory of what you experienced might be significantly different from what you actually experienced in the moment, and you have no reliable way to know when your memory is accurate versus when it's been distorted. I might remember a precognitive dream as more specific and detailed than it actually was, unconsciously retrofitting the dream to match what happened. My current memory of the experience is genuine, but it's not a faithful record of the original.

Confirmation Bias Affects What We Notice and Remember

If you believe in synchronicity, you'll notice meaningful coincidences and remember them. If you're skeptical, you'll dismiss them and forget them. If you expect to encounter spirits in ceremony, you're more likely to interpret ambiguous experiences as spirit encounters. This doesn't mean the experiences aren't real, but it does mean our beliefs shape what we experience, notice, and remember in ways in which we're not fully aware.

Different People Have Incompatible Experiences

Person A has a direct experience of Jesus as their personal Saviour. Person B has a direct experience of no-self in Buddhist meditation. Person C has a direct experience of communicating with deceased relatives. Person D has a direct experience of the universe as meaningless and indifferent. All four are appeals to direct experience, and they can't all be right about the nature of reality. So "I experienced it" can't be sufficient justification by itself, or all of these contradictory claims would be equally justified.

Experiences Can be Artificially Induced

Stimulate certain brain regions and you can induce out of body experiences, encounters with presences, mystical unity, or sensed communications with supernatural entities. Psychedelics can produce experiences indistinguishable from spontaneous mystical experiences. If the same experience can be induced artificially, does that make it less valid? Does the cause matter for whether the experience provides genuine knowledge? These are genuinely difficult questions.

The Problem of Intersubjective Verification

Science works largely through intersubjective verification, where multiple observers can check each other's observations and reach consensus. If I see a rainbow and you see the same rainbow, that's stronger evidence the rainbow exists than if only I see it.

But many profound experiences are private, subjective, and not readily shareable. My shamanic journeys are like this. I encounter spirits and receive information, but I can't bring you into my journey to verify what I'm experiencing. You have to take my word for it.

Mystical experiences are the same, since the sense of unity, the dissolution of self, the encounter with the infinite are radically subjective. How do we verify them? Precognitive information presents its own version of the problem. I know something will happen before it does, but until it happens, you can't verify my experience, and after it happens, we face all the memory problems I mentioned above. Without intersubjective verification, we're reliant on testimony, and testimony is notoriously unreliable, even when sincere.

What Makes Some Experiential Claims More Credible?

If "I experienced it" isn't enough by itself, what else do we need? What makes some experiential knowledge claims more trustworthy than others?

Consistency Over Time

Does the person have the same type of experience repeatedly? One weird experience is more likely to be a fluke. Consistent patterns are more compelling. I've had precognitive experiences regularly for decades. That doesn't prove they're veridical, but it's different from someone who had one strange dream once.

Specificity and Detail

Vague experiences are easy to fit to many interpretations. Specific, detailed experiences are harder to explain away. "I felt a presence" is very different from "I encountered an entity that identified itself as Raven, showed me a specific symbol I'd never seen before, and gave me information about a situation I knew nothing about that later proved accurate." The more specific the claim, the easier it is to verify or falsify.

Pragmatic Value

Does the experience lead to valuable outcomes? William James called this the pragmatic test of truth, asking simply whether believing it works. Shamanic journeys guide me to help clients. The information I receive proves useful. The healing happens. This doesn't prove the spirits are ontologically real, but it suggests the practice is accessing something genuine. If an experience reliably produces good results, that's evidence it's revealing something real, even if we don't understand what.

Coherence With Other Knowledge

Does the experience fit with other things we have good reason to believe or does it require us to reject vast amounts of well established knowledge? If I have an experience that seems to involve faster than light communication, that should raise my skepticism, because it conflicts with well established physics. But if I have an experience of non-local consciousness and there are philosophical arguments supporting consciousness as fundamental, that's more coherent.

Cultural and Historical Patterns

If many people across different cultures and time periods report similar experiences, that's more compelling than if one person has a unique experience. Mystical experiences show remarkable cross cultural consistency, and shamanic practitioners across continents report similar phenomenology of journeying. This doesn't prove they're accessing something real, but it's suggestive that they are.

Humility about Interpretation

If someone says "I experienced something, and I'm not sure what it means," that's more credible than "I experienced something, and I'm absolutely certain it means X." The willingness to separate experience from interpretation is itself evidence of epistemic virtue.

My Own Epistemic Standards

Here's how I actually navigate the tension between trusting my experiences and questioning them.

Tier One: High Confidence

What I'm confident about is that I have experiences of knowing things I shouldn't know, communicating with spirits, precognition, and altered states with distinct phenomenology. I'm confident because these have been consistent over decades, specific enough to verify, pragmatically valuable, and corroborated by others. What I'm not claiming is that my interpretation is correct, that I understand the mechanism, or that others should believe me.

Tier Two: Probable but Uncertain

What seems likely is that non-local consciousness is real in some form, that the spirits I work with have some kind of autonomous existence, and that precognition accesses actual future events. It's uncertain because multiple interpretations fit the data. It could be unconscious processing. It could be projection. It could be statistical flukes I'm misremembering. What keeps me open is that intellectual honesty requires admitting these alternatives are possible.

Tier Three: Genuine Mystery

What I don't know is how any of this works, what consciousness is, whether time is as linear as it seems, or what spirits actually are ontologically. I don't know because the experiences point to something, but they don't come with explanatory mechanisms, and multiple frameworks could account for the phenomenology. What I'm comfortable with is not knowing. Holding the question open. Continuing to investigate without premature certainty.

The Special Case of Transformative Experiences

Philosopher L.A. Paul has written about transformative experiences, the kind that fundamentally change who you are and how you see the world. Having a child. Going through war. Profound psychedelic experiences. Near death experiences. Spiritual awakening. These create an epistemic problem because before the experience, you can't fully understand what it will be like, and after the experience, you're a different person who can't fully communicate it to your pre-experience self.

Many shamanic experiences are transformative in this way. Dismemberment in journey. Ego death. Encounters with the sacred that fundamentally shift your worldview. How do you evaluate knowledge claims that come from these experiences when they can't be fully communicated to someone who hasn't had them?

My answer is that you can't fully justify them to others. But that doesn't make them less real or less important. It just means some knowledge is irreducibly first person.

What This Means for Spiritual Practice

In practical terms, here's how I hold this tension.

Trust the Experience, Question the Interpretation

When I journey and encounter a spirit, I trust that I'm having a genuine experience. But I hold lightly my interpretation of what that spirit is ontologically. The experience is real. The ontology is uncertain.

Seek Verification Where Possible

When shamanic journeys provide specific, verifiable information, I check it. When they provide guidance, I test whether it's actually helpful. I don't just assume everything from journey is true. I verify what can be verified.

Build in Error Correction

I regularly ask myself what if I'm wrong about this, what that would look like, and how I would know. I look for disconfirming evidence, not just confirmation. I admit when journeys produce garbage or when I misinterpreted something.

Stay Humble about Claims

I can say "I have these experiences." I'm more cautious about saying "Therefore, reality is like this." The jump from experience to metaphysical claim is larger than we often acknowledge.

Honour Multiple Perspectives

My experiences are real to me. Someone else's very different experiences are real to them. Both can be genuine without both interpretations being correct about objective reality. This doesn't collapse into relativism, since we can still evaluate claims, seek coherence, and prefer some interpretations over others. But it prevents the arrogance of assuming my experiences give me exclusive access to truth.

To Those Who Dismiss Direct Experience

If you're skeptical of experiential knowledge claims, especially spiritual or anomalous ones, I'd ask you to consider a few things. Not all experiences are equal. Some are more consistent, more specific, more corroborated, more pragmatically valuable than others, and dismissing all experiential claims because some are unreliable is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Science itself rests on experience, too. You trust the scientist's experience of reading a measurement, so why is that more valid than other forms of carefully attended experience? Absence of explanation isn't evidence of falsehood, since just because we don't understand how something works doesn't mean it doesn't happen. For centuries, we didn't understand how aspirin worked, but it still worked. And your own experiences matter. You likely trust your own experiences as sources of knowledge, so why would you deny others the same epistemic right?

To Those Who Over-Trust Direct Experience

And if you're someone who takes all spiritual experiences at face value, I'd offer a few cautions, too. Interpretation is not experience. You experienced something but what it means is a different question, so hold interpretations more loosely than experiences.

Experiences can mislead, since brain states, expectation, memory distortion, and confirmation bias can all make experiences seem more certain than they are. Verify what you can, and don't just accept everything from meditation or journey or mystical states as true.

Test it where possible. And stay epistemically humble because your experiences give you knowledge about your subjective states, not necessarily about objective reality. That distinction matters.

The Middle Path I'm Proposing

Direct experience is both foundational and insufficient. It's foundational because it's where all knowledge starts, it's our only direct contact with reality, and it has a special epistemic status. It's insufficient because it needs to be supplemented with critical thinking, error correction, verification, coherence checking, and intellectual humility.

The answer isn't to choose between trusting experience and questioning it. The answer is to do both simultaneously. Trust your experiences enough to take them seriously and investigate them. Question them enough to avoid self deception and unfounded certainty.

Hold the tension between "this experience is real" and "my interpretation might be wrong." Hold the tension between "I have access to knowledge through direct experience" and "that access is fallible and needs checking." This is harder than either extreme, complete trust or complete skepticism. But it's more honest.

Living the Question

After decades of profound experiences that don't fit conventional frameworks, here's where I am. I trust my experiences as genuine. They're not hallucinations or delusions. Something real is happening. I question my interpretations constantly because just having an experience doesn't mean I understand it correctly. I seek verification where possible, and I'm honest when verification isn't possible or when it fails. I stay humble about what I claim to know because "I've experienced this" is very different from "Therefore, reality is definitively like this." And I keep practicing while questioning. The uncertainty doesn't stop me from engaging shamanic work. It just keeps me honest about what I do and don't know.

This epistemology, trusting but verifying, experiencing but interpreting carefully, being certain about the experience but humble about the explanation, is the best I can do. It's not perfect. But it's honest. And sometimes honesty about uncertainty is more valuable than false certainty.

I'm Kathy Postelle Rixon, researcher of Philosophy of Mind, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and shamanic practitioner who lives with the epistemological tension between trusting profound experiences and questioning their interpretation. I don't have final answers, but I've thought carefully about how to navigate this. If this resonates, reach out at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit www.magicinharmony.com.

How do you evaluate your own experiences? What helps you distinguish genuine knowledge from self deception? Where do you find the balance between trust and skepticism? I'd genuinely love to hear your perspective.